Chinese Posters in Egypt

In the final hours before Mubarak was to appear on television, I was left pondering this odd photo out of Egypt. In Chinese, this placard declares, “The Egyptian people demand that President Mubarak step down.” Linguist Victor Mair posted it to his Language Log blog, and asked, rightly: Who is the intended audience? Why put it in Chinese? Along with another picture making the rounds, which combines Chinese and Arabic, this image has inevitably re-stoked discussion about whether the protesters in Tahrir Square see the prospect of contagion in their work. As Mair (and one his commenters) point out, the message in at least one of these pictures appears to be directed more to those inside Egypt than outside: The Chinese characters may be serving as the Arabic equivalent of it’s-all-Greek-to-me, mocking Mubarak for being deaf to the people’s demands in any language. But the image above is something else; I suspect the objective is to earn a place on as many television screens and newspaper pages as possible. Without knowing how many signs are also appearing in Spanish or Swedish, it’s hard to say, but, anyway, it’s perhaps an indication, most of all, that the influence and breadth of the Chinese audience is now on the minds of Egyptian protesters in ways it might not have been just a few years ago.

The events in Egypt have continued to ripple through Chinese circles. Official instructions to the media, sent out in secret from the State Council Information Office and Bureau 11 of the Ministry of Public Security, have leaked (via China Digital Times): “Websites are to strengthen [monitoring] of posts, forums, blogs, and particularly posts on microblogs,” the orders say. “Our bureaus will forcibly shut down websites that are lax in monitoring.”

That monitoring has not stopped people from musing about how the Egypt events look from China. I’ve written about the differences that I’ve seen from my time in Egypt and China. The reliably thoughtful Shanghai-based writer Adam Minter offers a counterproposal: Instead of trying to get a handle on the attitudes of 1.3 billion Chinese people, he suggests that it might be better to try to ask “whether China has sufficient, robust institutions whereby average Chinese citizens can vent their frustrations, anger, and grievances.” He makes a good point. So, are China’s institutions for managing discontent up to the task? According to one oft-cited measurement, China’s police has recorded the annual number of “mass incidents” (over one hundred people) surging more than eight-fold between 1993 and 2004, to 74,000 that year. (Insert the usual caveats here about Beijing’s figures, measurement biases, etc., but it’s safe to say, for the moment, that the general trend is true.) How successfully has the Party been able to deal with that increase? Depending on the point of view, it has either managed the tensions successfully, as demonstrated by its enduring power, or it has simply postponed an inevitable reckoning. Up to now, as politics-watcher Russell Leigh Moses put it, in the face of major problems, “the Party danced between the downpours.”

Institutions certainly matter, but the full measurement of their sufficiency reflects some maddeningly imprecise things, such as public perception of them, and whether, at any given moment, the urgency of reform outweighs the inertia of the status quo. Liberal commentator Zhang Wen writes this week that China’s halting creep toward democracy reflects, in part, the fact that “the pressure is not yet great enough to force authorities to compromise. Some people have brought up that popular movement from 20 years ago, saying that the people’s refusal to compromise eventually led to bloodshed,” he writes, referring to Tiananmen Square. (Translated by China Elections and Governance.) Zhang goes on, “But in actuality, on the subject of political reform, it must be the government that complies with the will of the people; the government must be more willing to enter into compromise.”

On an unrelated note, Sophie Roell over at Five Books has posted an interview with me about five of the best books to pick up before a visit to China these days. Good books, good questions.